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Bulletin de la Sociiti Amhicaine de Philosophie de Langue Franrais Volume 14} Number 2} Fall 2004

Nietzsehe, and Parody

Pierre I

Parody and polytheism in Nietzsche? At first sight, it is not at all clear what relation exists between these two terms, nor what kind oE concerns would lead one to speak oE them, nor what interest one n1ight have in raising such a question. If for most people Nietzsche's name is inseparable from the utterance is dead, then it may seem surprising to speak of the religion of many with regard to Nietzsche. After all, there are countless people today for whom Nietzsche's name signifies nothing more than this utterance-and they did not need Nietzsche to know that all the gods are dead. It mayaiso seem, perhaps, that I am simply using Nietzsche to demonstrate the existence of many gods and to legitimate polytheism; and, by playing on these words, I will not escape the reproach, under the pretext of showing the meaning of parody in Nietzsche, of making a parody of myself and thus of parodying Nietzsche. If I must open myself to such confusion, I would nevertheless like to make one thing clear: insofar as one is lead to interpret the thought of a mind [eprit] that one tries to comprehend and make comprehensible, there is no one who leads his interpreter to parody him as much as Nietzsche.

82 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY This is true not only of those interpreters who are smitten with his thought, but also those who try hard to refute him as a dangerous spirit. Nietzsche himself urged one of his first interpreters-no one had yet spoken of hirn-to abandon all pathos, not to take sides in his favor, and to put up a sort of ironic resistance when characterizing him. Here, then, we cannot avoid being the victim of a sort of ruse, nor can we avoid falling into the trap inherent in Nietzsche's own experience and thought. Unless we simply undertake the work of the historian, as Andler did,l the moment we try to elucidate Nietzsche's thought, he is always made to say more than he says and less than he says. This is not-as is often the case with thinkers--due to a simple lack of perspective or even because a determinate point of departure has been omitted. In assimilating Nietzsche, we make him say more than he says, while in rejecting or altering him, we make rum say less than he says-for the simple reason that, properly speaking, with Nietzsche there is hardly either a point of departure or a precise terminus. Nietzsche's contemporaries and friends were able to follow an evolution from to The Wanderer and His Shadow and on to The Gqy Science) and from Zarathustra to The . But those of us who have at our disposal the youthful writings as weil as the posthumous work, includingEcce Homo, have not only been able to follow the ramifications of Nietzsche's posterity, and to witness the accusations made against Nietzsche as a result of recent historical upheavals, but have also been able to discern something which, I think, is not without importance: Nietzsche, who was despite everything a professor of philology at Basel, and thus an academic with absolutely certain pedagogical ambitions, did not develop a philosophy. Instead, outside of the framework of the university, Nietzsche developed variations on a personal then1e. Living a simple life marked by extreme suffering and convalescence, forced to sojourn with increasing frequency at health resorts, while in the midst of the greatest intellectual isolation, Nietzsche was thereby abandoned, in the most 83 PIERRE I

84 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY Andso heputsimulacra into seienee and saenee into simulacra: in sueh a wqy that the seientist ean sqy: ''Qualis artifexpereo!'3 Nietzsehe was prey to an inelucidable revelation of existence that did not know how to express itself except through song and image. A struggle was being waged within him between the poet and the scholar, between the visionary and the moralist, each of which was trying to disqualify the role of the other. This struggle was provoked by a feeling of moral responsibility toward his contemporaries. The different tendencies, the different attitudes that were fighting over Nietzsche's consciousness would endure until a crucial event was produced: Nietzsehe would be externalized in a character, a veritable dramatis persona: Zarathustra-a character who is not only the product of a fictive redoubling, but is in some way achallenge by Nietzsehe the visionary to Nietzsehe the professor and man of letters. The character of Zarathustra has a complex function: on the one hand, he is the Christ, as Nietzsehe secretly and jealously understands him; but on the other hand, insofar as he is the Accuser of the traditional Christ, he is the one who prepares the way for the advent of Dionysus philosophos. The years during which was fashioned, and especially those that followed its birth, were for Nietzsehe astate of unparalleled distress: One pays dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive. There is something that I call the rancor of what is great: everything great-a work, a deed-is no sooner accomplished than it turns against the man who clid it. By doing it, he has become weak; he no longer endures his deed, he can no longer face it. Something one was never permitted to will lies behind one, something in which the knot in the destiny of humanity is tied-and now one labors under itI-It almost crushes one... 4

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86 NIETZSCI--IE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY Christian.) 3. The true world-unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it-a consolation, an obligation, as an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.) 4. The true world-unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.) 5. The true world-an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating-an idea that has become useless and superfluous-consequentlJ, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day...return of bon sens and gaiety: Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.) 6. The true world-we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But not With the true world we have abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of tl1e shortest shadow; end of the longest error: Incipit Zarathustra.~5 With the true world, we have abolished the apparent world. When the true world (the Platonie, Christian, spiritualist, idealist, transcendental world) that serves as the point of reference for the apparent world clisappears, then the apparent world clisappears as weIl. The apparent world cannot become the real world of scientific positivism: the world becomes a fable, the world as such is only a fable. "Fable" means something that is narrated, and that exists only in its narration.

87 The world is something that is narrated, a narrated event, and hence an interpretation. Religion, art, scienee, and history are so many diverse interpretations of the world, or rather, so many variants of the fable. Is this to say that we are dealing here with a universal illusionism? Not at alle The fable, I said, is an event that is narrated; it happens, or rather, it must make something happen; and in effeet an action takes plaee and narrates itself; but if we are not content to listen and follow, if we seek to apprehend the narration in order to discern whether behind the recitation there is not some moment that differs from what we understand in the narration, then everything is interrupted­ and onee again, there is a true world and an apparent world. We have seen how the true world and the apparent world have become a fable, but this is not the first time. There is something in Nietzsche's text that warrants mention: midday, hour of the shortest shadow. After midday, everything begins again, including the ancient world, that is to say, the past interpretations. In antiquity, the hour of midday was an hour at once lueky and ill-fated ffaste et nifaste] , not only an hour in which all activity was suspended under the blinding light of the sun, but also an hour of forbidden visions, followed by delirium. After midday, the day declines into shadows; but through these shadows, we will be guided to profound midnight by Zarathustra, the master of the fable. Fable, fabula, comes from the Latin verb fan, which means both "to predict" and "to rave" r,predire et divagueij, to prediet fate and to rave;fatum} fate, is also the past partieiple offari. Thus when we say that the world has become fable, we are also saying that it is afatum; one raves, butin raving one foretells and predicts fate. We emphasize these connotations here beeause of the role that fatality-the erucial notion of fatum-plays in Nietzsche's thought. The re-fabulation of the world also means that the world exits historical time in order to reenter the time oE myth, that is, eternity. Or rather, it means that the vision oE the world is an apprehension oE

88 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY eternity. Nietzsche saw that the mental conditions for such an "exit" [sorlie] lay in theforgetting (of the historical situation) that was preliminary to the act of creating: in forgetting, the past is remembered [sous-vient a] by humans as their future, which takes theftgure of the past. 6 It is in this way that the past comes to [advien~ them in what they create; for what they believe they create in this way does not come to them from the present, but is only the pronunciation of a prior possibility in the momentary forgetting of the (historically determined) present. Zarathustra's mission is to give a new meaning and a new will to men in a world that he is necessarily going to recreate. But since every created world risks losing its meaning and becoming fabulous and divine once again, and since it may be rejected and seem intolerable to men now that they have come to will nothing rather than something, Zarathustra must reveal to them the true way, which is not a straight path but a tortuous one: For here is all my creating and striving} that I create and carry together into one what isfragment and riddle and dreadful chance. 7 Along with the true world, we have abolished the apparent world-along with the preoccupation with truth, we have liquidated the explanation of appearances. (" 'Explanation' is what we call ilj but itis 'description' that distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. Gur descriptions are better--but we do not explain any more than our predecessors."~ All this is full of consequence, for if the thought of having abolished the apparent world along with the true world is not a simple quip, it gives an account of what was happening in Nietzsche himself. He had given notice to the world in which he still carried the name of "Nietzsche" (and if he continued to write under this name, it was in order to save appearances): everything has cllanged and nothing has changed. It is better to let those wl~o act believe they are changing something. Does not Nietzsche say that these people are not, in fact, men of action, but rather contemplatives who put a price on 89 PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI things-and that men of action act only by virtue oE this appreciation by the contemplatives? But this suppression of the apparent world, with its reference to the true world, finds expression in a long process that can be followed only if we take into account the coexistence, within Nietzsehe, of the scientist and the moralist-or more essentially, the psychologist and the visionary. Two different terrninologies result from this, which, in their perpetual interference, form an inescapable web. In the end, the lucidity of the psychologist, the destroyer of images, will simply be put to work by the poet, and thus for the fable. In his attempt to scrutinize the lived experience of the poet-the sleepwalker of the day-the psychologist would discover regions in which he himself was dreaming out loud. This analysis of the psychologist, before he was invaded by the dreams and visions he tried to avoid, allows us to see succinctly how, in the name of the rational principles of positivism, Nietzsehe winds up ruining not only the rational concept of truth but also the concept of conscious thought, including the operations of the intellect; and how, on the other hand, this depreciation of conscious thought leads Nietzsehe to question the validity of any communicability through language; and we can see more clearly how this analysis­ which reduces rational thought to impulsive forces, but which attributes to these impulsive forces the quality of authentie existence-leads to a suppression of the limits between the outside and the inside, a suppression of the limits between existence individuated here and now and existence returning to itse!! within the person of the philosopher. What presides over this disintegration of concepts-for obviously something n1ust subsist-is always the intensity of the mind which has been excited to a supreme degree of insomnia; a sustained perspicacity that drives to despair the demand for integrity, a perspicacity whose rigor goes so far as to want to be liberated from these functions of thought as if from a final servitude, a final link with what Nietzsehe called "the spirit of gravity." The analysis of consciousness that Nietzsehe gives in

90 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY various aphorisms of may be summarized in the following observations: 1. Conseiousness was the latest funetion to develop in the evolution of organie life; it is also the most fragile funetion, and eonsequently, the most dangerous one. If humanity had beeome eonseious all at onee, as it has been believed, it would have perished a long time ago. The proof of this lies in the great number of false steps that conseiousness has provoked in the life of the speeies, and that it continues to provoke in the live of individuals, insofar as it creates a disequilibrium in their impulses. 2. This undesirable function (undesirable because it corresponds to an incompatible aspiration, the aspiration to truth) undergoes an initial adaptation to otherimpulsive forces; for a time, eonseiousness is linked to the life-conserving instinet; and then one forms the fallacious notion of a conseiousness that is stable, eternal, immutable and, consequently, free and responsible. Because of this overestin1ation of conseiousness, its over-hasty elaboration has been avoided. Prom this arises the notion of substance. 3. The mental operations that this (opportunely retarded) eonsciousness develops in its elaboration-these operations that eonstitute logieal reason and rational knowledge-are merely the produets of this compromise between the impulsive life and eonseiousness. From what is logie born? Obviously from the illogieality whose domain was originally immense. At this stage, aeeording to Nietzsehe's positivist description, logic becomes the strongest weapon of the impulses, particularly for those beings in which aggressiveness is translated into affirmation or negation, while illogicality remains the domain of the weakest impulses. Opportunely retarded in its own development, consciousness (as false consciousness) develops conscious thought out of the need to communicate through language. Such is the origin of the most subtle operations that constitute logical reason and rational knowledge. At bottom, every high degree of caution in 91 PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency-to affirn1 rather than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just-had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.9 4. Consciousness, as a threatening function because of its anti-vital aspiration, therefore fmds itself momentarily in retreat. In the relationship of knowledge, however, this dangerous power is manifested anew in its true light. Logical reason, constructed by the impulses in the course of this combat with the anti-vital tendency of consciousness, engenders habits of thinking which the still-maladapted tendency of consciousness is led to detect as errors. These errors-which are precisely those that make life possible, and which Nietzsehe will later recognize as forms for the apprehension of existence-always observe the same rules of the game: namely, that there are durable things; that objects, materials, and bodies exist; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is good in an intrinsic manner-ingrained propositions that have become the norms in accordance with which logical reason establishes the true and the non-true. "It was only very late," says Nietzsche, "that truth emerged-as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite."10 Hence, Nietzsche remarks, the strength of different sorts of knowledge does not reside in their degree of truth, but in their degree of antiquity, their degree of incorporation, their character as conditions forelife. Nietzsche here cites the example of the Eleatics, who wanted to put our sensible perceptions in doubt. The Eleatics, he says, believed it was possible to live the antinomies of the natural errors. But in order both to aJftrm the antinomy and to live it, they invented the sage, a person who

92 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY was both impersonal and unchangeable, and thus they fell into illusion CI am still citing Nietzsche). Unable to abstract from their own human condition, misunderstanding the nature of the knowing subject, and denying the violence of the impulses in knowledge, the Eleatics, in an fashion, believed they could conceive of reason as a perfectly free activity. Probity and skepticism, those dangerous manifestations of consciousness, were able to develop in ever more subtle ways at the momentwhen these two contradictory propositions appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with fundamental errors-the moment it became possible to dispute about their greater or lesser degree of utility for life. Likewise, other new propositions, while not useful to life, were nonetheless not harmful to life because they were simply expressions in an intellectual game; and consequently, they bore witness to the innocent and fortunate character of every game. At that moment, the act of knowing and the aspiration to the true were finally integrated as one need among other needs. Not only belief or conviction, but also examination, negation, mistrust, or contradiction constituted a power [une puissance] , such tl'lat even the bad instincts were subordinated and placed in the service of knowledge, and acquired the prestige of whatis licit, venerated, and useful-and ultimately the look and innocence of the Good. Nietzsche thereby comes to this first conclusion on the precise situation of the philosopher: The thinker is now that being in whom the impulse to truth and those liJe-preserving errors clash for their firstfight, after the impulsefor truth has proved to be also a liJe-preservingpower. 11 The impulse to truth is a life-conserving power? But here this is only a hypothesis, a momentary concession. In fact, Nietzsehe concludes with a question: "To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment to be performed [/'expenence cl faire]."12 Nietzsche himself will carry this experiment to its conclusion. When Nietzsehe evoked the exampIe of the 93 PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI Eleatics as an attempt to live the natural antinomies-an attempt that required the impossible in1personality of the philosopher in order to succeed-it was his own experience that he was projecting into the paste The Eleatics, said Nietzsche, invented the figure of the impersonal and immutable sage as being both One and All. In so doing, they fell into illusion, Nietzsche declares, because they remained unaware of the violence of the impulses in the knowing subject. Butif Nietzsehe, in this judgment against the Eleatics, presents himself as the person in whom this illusory experience has been brought to consciousness, it is precisely because he himself, obscurely, aspires to be both One and All, as if he now saw the secret of the experiment in areturn of consciousness to the unconsciousJ and 0/ the unconscious to consciousness-so completely and so well that, at the end as at the beginning, it would seem that the true world exists nowhere else than in the sage. Here, we must immediately distinguish between the experiment to be performed and the lived experience [l'experience dfaire et l'experience vecue], between the sufJering and the willing. In effect, we would like to know if the lived experience-Nietzsche's specific experience, the ecstasy of the in which the ego would suddenly find itself to be both One and All, One and Multiple-could be made the object of a demonstration, and thus constitute the point of departure for a moral teaching. But we must confine ourselves here to the question we posed earlier: Could the philosopher have knowledge of a state inwhich he would be both One andAll, one and multiple, given the fact that he will always ascribe more and more consciousness to his pathos? In other words: How could he possess his pathos knowingly insofar as the pathos would be an apprehension of existence returning upon itself? In aphorisn1 333 of The Gqy Science, Nietzsche provides a commentary on one of Spinoza's propositions that takes us

94 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY to the heart of this problem: The meaning of knowing.- Non ndere} non lugere} neque detestan} sed intelligere! says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as is his wont. Yet in the last analysis, what else is this intelligere than the form in which we come to feel the other three at once? One result of the different and mutually opposed impulses to laugh, lament, and curse? Before knowledge is possible, each of these impulses must first have presented its one-sided view of the thing or the event; after this comes the fight between these one­ sided views, and occasionally this results in a mean, one grows calm, one finds all three sides right, and there is a kind of justice and a contract; for by virtue of justice and a contract all these instincts can maintain their existence and assert their rights against each other. Since only the last scenes of reconciliation and the final accounting at the end ofthis long process rise to our consciousness, we suppose that intelligere must be something conciliatory, just, and good-something that stands essentially opposed to the instincts, while it is actually nothing but a certain behaviorof the instincts toward one another. For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself. Orlly now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our spirit's activity remains unconscious and unfelt. But I suppose that these instincts which are here contending against one another understand very wen how to make themselves feIt by, and how to hurt, one another. This may wen be the source of that sudden and violent exhaustion that afflicts an thinkers (it is tl1e exhaustion on a battlefield). 95 PIERRE KLOSSOWSI

Indeed, there may he occasions of concealed heroism in our warring depths, but certainly nothing divine that eternally rests in itself, as Spinoza supposed. Conscious thinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge. In this very beautiful passage, I suspect that Nietzsche has defined, in a negative manner, his own mode of comprehending and knowing: ndere} lugere} detestan Oaughing, crying, hating) are three ways of apprehending existence. But what is a science that laughs, or cries, or detests? A pathetic knowledge? Our pathos knows, butwe are never able to share its mode of knowing. For Nietzsche, every intellectual act corresponds to variations of astate of humor. Now, to attribute a character of absolute to pathos ruins, in a single hlow, the notion that knowledge is impartial, since it was only from an acquired degree of in1partiality that one called into dO~Lht that same impartiality. This ingratitude is the inverse of knowledge, which is disavowed as soon as it makes us comprehend that we cannot know-an ingratitude that will give birth to a new impartiality, hut within an absolute partiality: Forif logical conclusions are nothinghut the conflict among the impulses that can only end in something unjust, to aspire to more partialitywould be to observe the highest justice. If the thinker, as Nietzsche says, is the being in whom the impulse to truth and the life-preserving errors live and struggle together, and if the question is knowing to what extent truth can bear incorporation-if that is the experiment that must now be performed-then let us now try to see in what sense pathos is capable of this incorporation as an apprehension of existence. Now that the intellectual act has been devalorized-since it only takes place at the price of a supreme exhaustion-why not admit hilarity as much as seriousness as an organ of knowledge, for example, or anger

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,as much as serenity? Once seriousness is admitted to be a state as doubtfl.ll as hatred or even love, why could not hilarity be as valid and obvious an apprehension of existence as seriousness? The act of knowing, judging, or concluding is nothing but the result of a certain behavior of the impulses toward each other. Moreover, conscious thought-especially the thought of the philosopher-is most often the expression of a fall, adepression provoked by a terrible quarrel between two or three contradictory impulses that results in something unjust in itself. Does this mean that the philosopher (or the thinker or the sage, in the Nietzschean sense) should give himself over to a similarly contradictory behavior among the impulses? Or that he should never speak except in statements thatparticipate in two or three simultaneous impulses, thereby giving an account of existence apprehended through these two or three impulses? Ifthe act ofcomprehending somethingis at this point suspect-since it never reaches a conclusion except by eliminating one of the impulses that has, in varying degrees, contributed to its formation-and if comprehending is nothing other than a precarious armistice between obscure forces, then, out of this concern for integrity that directs Nietzsche's investigation so as to bring more consciousness to our impulsive forces, comprehending can act only by exercising a perpetual complicity with our tendencies, good or bad. However, does it not seem that this illusion is worse than the one for which Nietzsche reproached Spinoza, when Spinoza opposed the act of comprehending to the fact of laughing, crying, and hating? How can an obscure force reach consciousness as an obscure force ifit does not already belong to the fulllight of consciousness? As the Apostle said, "All things that are condemned are made manifest by the light, jor whatever makes manifest is light."13 How to manifest without condemning? How can an obscure force be made manifest without condemning itself to be illuminated? Could there not be a light that is not a condemnation of the shadows? Pathos knows, no doubt, 9 PIERRE KLOSSOWSI

98 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY as possible, 'to know ourselves,' each of us will only succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but 'average'....Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness thry no longer seem 10 be. 16 conclude: every coming to consciousness is the result of an operation of generalization, of falsification, and thus is a fundamentally ruinous operation. It is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: this distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the of the people). It is even less the opposition of 'thing-in-itself' and appearance; for we do now 'know' nearly enough to be entided to any such distinction. We simply lack anyorgan for knowledge, for 'truth': we 'know' (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be usejul in the interests oE the human herd, the species; and even what is here called 'utility' is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish someday.17 According to this definition, what conscious thought produces is always only the most utilizable part of ourselves, because only that part is communicable; what we have of the most essential part of ourselves will thus remain an incommunicable and non-utilizable pathos. By the individual, by the personal, by the most essential part of ourselves, Nietzsche in no way means what is generally understood by the term "individualism." We will see, on the contrary, that the individual and the non-individual will be linked in an indiscernible unity, which is indicated by this very 99 PIERRE KLOSSOWSI

[00 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY constitutes an ensemble of needs. But does it not then seek to satisfyitself inits own dissipation [dpense]?18 And howwould this dissipation effect itself and find satisfaction? When our deepest need expresses the most essential part of ourselves in laughter and tears, for example, it would dissipate itself as laughing and crying, which are in themselves the image of this need. The laughing and crying would be produced independently of any motive that conscious thought would attribute to them, rightly or wrongly, from its goal-oriented perspective. And being thus dissipated, our most profound need and the loss of any goal would coincide, for an instant, with our profound happiness. Even when we do not know how to share its mode of understanding, our pathos does not thereby prevent us from understanding ourselves. For where do such sudden satisfactions, coupled with the absence of any rational motive, come from-for instance, when I laugh or cry, seemingly without reason, before some spectacle such as those offered by the view of a suddenly-discovered landscape or of tidal pools at the edge of the ocean? Something is laughing or crying in us that, by making use of us, is robbing us of ourselves and concealing us from ourselves; hut which, hy making use of us, is concealing itself. Does this mean that this something was not present otherwise than in the tears and laughter? For if I laugh and cry in this way, I take myself to be expressing nothing but the immediate vanishing of this unknown motive, which has found in me neither figure nor sense, apart from the image of this forest or these waves greedy for buried treasures. In relation to this unknown motive, which is hidden from me by these outward images, I am, in Nietzsche's sense, only a fragment, an enigma to myself, a horrifying chance. And I will remain afragment, an enigma, and a chance in relation to that most essential aspect of myself, which speaks through this laughter and these tears without any rational motive. But this most essential aspect of myself, which is made manifest in this way, corresponds to an image hidden in the fulllight of consciousness, an image that appears to me as inverted and 101 PIERRE KLOSSOWSI

102 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY down to formulating what Nietzsehe states in the following proposition: "Truth is an error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimate/y decisive."19 The most reeent aspiration that has eome to life-this dangerous aspiration to truth-is l~othingother than the return of pathos in its totality in the form of a goal. But here we diseover something disquieting in Nietzsehe. What did he mean by posing the question of knowing if truth could endure its incorporation as a condition of life? What did he mean by saying that the impulsive aspiration to truth had beeome life-preserving at the same time as the natural errors? Are not these questions asked from the viewpoint of eonseious and gregarious thought, that is, in the terms of the very eonseiousness that neeessarily gives itself a goal? And would not the terms "error" and "truth," whieh had previously been emptied of their gregarious meaning, immediately be filled again with this same eontent? For the philosopher (or the thinker or the sage in the Nietzsehean sense), the question is: "What form eould be given to this experienee so that it eould be taught?" How eould the will be persuaded to will the opposite of every goal given by conscious thought, such that the will could strive to reeuperate its most essential and least eommunieable aspeet? How eould the will be persuaded to take itself as its own objeet, thereby produeing an apprehension of existenee returning to itself just as the will returns to itself? Was it not neeessary to appeal to eonseious thought, and thus to borrow from the language of the herd (in this ease, the language of positivism), and thus to take up onee again the notions of utility and goal, and direet them toward and against every utility, toward and against every goal? In his retrospeetive prefaee to The Gqy Science, dated 1886, we read: 'Incipit tragedia' is written at the end of this book, with a disquieting easualness-Beware! Something downright wieked and malieious is announeed here: incipitparodia. 20 103 PIERRE KLOSSOWSI

In the first aphorism of The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks: What is the meaning of the ever new appearance of these founders of moralities and religions...these teachers of remorse and religious wars? What is the meaning of these heroes on this stage? ...It is obvious that these trageclians, tao, promote the interest of God or work as God's emissaries. They, tao, promote the life of the species bypromoting the faith in lift. 'Life is worth living,' every one of them shouts; 'there is samething to life, there is samething behind life, beneath it; bewarel From time to time this instinct, which is at work equally in the highest and basest men­ the instinct for the preservation of the species-erupts as reason and as passion of the spirit. Then it is surrounded by a resplendent retinue of reason and tries with all the force at its command to make us forget that at bottom it is instinct, drive, folly, lack of reasons. Life shallbe loved, because-/Man shall advance himself and his neighbor, because-I....In order that what happens necessarily and always, spontaneously and without any purpose, may henceforth appear to be done for same purpase and strike man as rational and an ultimate commandment, the ethical teacher comes on the stage, as the teacher of the purpose of existence; and to this end he invents a second, different existence and unhinges by means of his new mechanies the old, orclinary existence." 21 And Nietzsche cancludes: Not only laughter and gay wisdom but the tragic, tao, with all its sublime unreason, belangs amang the means and necessities of

104 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY

the preservation of the species. Consequently-. Consequently. Consequently. 0, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand trus new law of ebb and flood? There is a time for us, toO!22 Does this mean that Nietzsehe in turn would like to enter the stage as a new doctor of the goal of existence? As a new doctor of morality? Does this mean that, in order to come to the aid of the most essential aspect of ourselves, we must inevitably appeal to the rationalizations of conscious thought and the positing of a goal-even though it is a question of apprehending an existence without a goal? Nietzsehe always has a formula that seems to imply an imperative: the . Trus entails a serious question: what is Nietzsche's true language? Is it the language of lived experience, or of inspiration, or of revelation, or perhaps of the experiment to be performed, the language of experimentation? Is there not, in each case, an interference between these various languages, which intervenes in the desire to legitimate the incommunicable lived experience of the eternal return by way of a demonstration? Does not Nietzsehe provide this demonstration at the level of the scientifically verifiable cosmos-and on the moral plane, by elaborating an imperative that can command the will under its relation to the will to power? Is this not the point where the dubious references to science and biology intervene, when Nietzsche's fundamental experience is already being expressed on an entirely different level by the character of Zarathustra? Perhaps we have here one of the alternating terms, one of the aspects of Nietzsche's antinomy: the experience of the eternity of the self at the ecstatic moment of the eternal return of all things could not be the object of al1 experimentation any more than it could be the object of a rationally constructed elucidation; any more than the lived, inexpressible, and therefore incommunicable experience could ground an etrucal imperative that would turn the lived into something willed and rewilled, insofar as the 105 PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI universal movement of the eternal return is supposed to lead the will to will infallibly at the willedmoment. The lived experience is thus entirely implicit in a contemplation where the will is completely absorbed in an existence rendered to itself-so that the will to power is simply an attribute of existence, which wills itself onlyinsofar as it iso This explains the often doubtful character of those propositions of Nietzsche's, in the fragments on the , that consider will to power independently of the law of the eternal return, independently of this revelation from which it is inseparable. At the level of lived experience, Nietzsche is already surpassed by his own Zarathustra. Nietzsche is no more than the doctor of a counter-morality that is seemingly expressed in clear language, and whose worth comes from this audacious use of conscious thought for the benefit of that which has no goal. He is the doctor of a goal for existence, charged with covering up his own retreat into that region where, in reality, he has already retired-this immortality from which he has perished, as he says more than onee, and from which he will return in delirious transports to show what he is under two different nan1es: Dionysus and the Crucified. After the proposition: Truth is a necessary error, we find this other proposition: Art is a higher value than truth, which is the conclusion of those propositions which declare that art prevents usfrom losing ourselves in the truth or artprotects usfrom the truth. All these propositions have the same pragmatic character as the preceding proposition: truth is on!J a necessary error3-a character that holds precisely because everything is being considered solely from the viewpoint of its usefulness. Nevertheless, as soon as error creates forms, it goes without saying that art must effectively beeome that domain where willed error inaugurates a rule of the game. Just as it is contradictory to give a practical application of truth as error, so it appears that, in this domain of the game par excellence which is art, imposture constitutes a legitimate activity in accord with the reason of fiction. But art has a very wide meaning, and in Nietzsche, this category includes institutions as much

106 I NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY las works of free creation. For example-and here we can see [mmecliately what is at issue-how does Nietzsche consider Ithe Church? For him, the Church is constitutedgrosso modo by a cast of profound impostors: the priests. The Church is a masterpiece of spiritual domination, and it required that impossible plebian monk, Luther, to dream of ruining that masterpiece, the last eclifice of Roman civilization among uso The admiration Nietzsehe always had for the Church and the papacy rests precisely upon the idea that truth is an error, and that art, as willed error, is higher than truth. This is why Zarathustra confesses his affinity with the priest, and why, in the Fourth Part, during that extraorclinary gathering of the different kinds of higher men in Zarathustra's cave, the Pope­ the Last Pope-is one of the prophet's guests of honor.24 This betrays, I think, Nietzsche's temptation to foresee a ruling class of great meta-p!Jchologists who would take charge of the destinies of future humanity, since they would know perfectly both the different aspirations and the different resources capable of satisfying them. What interests us, however, is a particular problem that never ceased to preoccupy Nietzsehe: the problem of the actor. We read in aphorism 361 of The Gqy 5cience: Falseness with a good conscience; the delight in simulation exploding as apower that pushes aside one's so-called 'character,' flooding it and at times extinguishing it; the inner craving for a role and mask, for appearance; an excess of the capacity for all kinds of adaptations that can no longer be satisfied in the service of the most immediate and narrow utility-all of this is perhaps not only peculiar to the actor.25 Let us take careful note of everything Nietzsehe is revealing here: delight in simulation exploding as apower; pushing aside one} so-called ucharacter," submerging it sometimes to the point of extinguishing it-here we suddenly perceive what was threatening Nietzsehe himself: first of all, simulation exploding 107 PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI as power to the point of submerging or extinguishing one's so-ealled "eharaeter." The point here is that simulation is not only a means but also apower--and thus that there is an irruption of something ineompatible with one's so-ealled "eharaeter," a putting into question of what one is in a situation that has been determined by this same indeterminable. Nietzsehe ealls this putting into question a surplus of the adaptive faculties, but this surplus, he remarks, never manages to satisJy itse!/, or to serve an immediate and strict utiliry. This is why that which is expressed by thus surplus of the faeulties of adaptation has a role, whieh is existence itse!f-existenee without a goal, existenee suffieient unto itselE Butlet us return, onee again, to the [lIst line:falseness with agood conscience. Here we eonfront anew the notion of the willed error. In the rationality of simulaera, it is willed error that provides an aeeount of that existenee whose very essenee lies in the truth that eoneeals itself, that refuses itself. Existence seeks a physiognomy in order to reveal itse!/; the actor is its medium. What reveals existenee? A possible physiognomy: perhaps that oE a gode In another eurious passage from The Gay 5cience (aphorism 356), entitled "How things will become ever more ~rtistic' in Europe," Nietzsehe remarks that the need to make a living eompels almost all Europeans to adopt a partieular role, their "oeeupation." Some people manage to retain the merely apparent freedom of ehoosing this role for themselves, while for most people it is preseribed in advanee. The result is quite singular: almost everyone identifies themselves with their role-everyoneforgets at whatpoint chance) disposition) and arbitrariness were at work in them when the question of their so-ealled "voeation" was deeided-and how many other roles they might perhaps have been able to play, although now it is too late. In a more profound sense) the role has actual!J become characte!; and art has become nature. Later, the same aphorism diseusses the question of soeial degradation, but what I would like to emphasize is this: what is here deseribed as a phenomenon of eontemporary soeiallife appears in reality as the image of destiny itself-and of Nietzsehe's destiny in partieular. We

108 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY believe we choose freely to be what we are, but not being what we are, we are in fact constrained to play a role-and thus to play the role of what we are outside ourselves. We are never where we are, but always where we are only the actor of this other that we are. The role represents the fortuitousness in the necessity of destiny. We cannot not will, but we can never will something other than a role. To know this is to play in good conscience, and to playas weIl as possible amounts to dissimulating oneself. Thus, to be aprofessor of philology at Basel or even the author of Zarathustra is nothing other than to play a role. What one dissimulates is the fact that one is nothing other than existence, and one dissimulates the fact that the role one plays refers to existence itself. This problem of the actor in Nietzsehe, and this irruption of a power in a so-called "character" that threatens to submerge it to the point of extinguishing it-this problem, I am saying, is immediately relevant to Nietzsche's ownidentity, to the putting in question of this identity considered as fortuitously received and then taken on as a role-just as the role someone chooses to play can be rejected as a mask in favor of another one from among the thousands of masks of history. Having produced this conception from the valorization of the willed error, the valorization of imposture as a simulacrum, it now remains to determine to what extent the simulacrum, if it is an apprehension of existence, constitutes a manifestation of being in the existent being-a manifestation of being in the fortuitous existent. Is existence still capable of a God? asks Heidegger. This question is asked as much in the biographical context of the personwho formulates it for the first time as a piece of news­ God is dead-as it is asked in the context of the events and the thought of the contemporary epoche The day after bis collapse, in Turin, Nietzsche awakens with the feeling of being both Dionysus and the Crucified, and he signs the letters he sends to Strindberg, Burckhardt, and other notable figures with one of these divine names. Until this point, it had always been a matter of 109 PIERRE KLOSSOWSI

110 NIETZSCHE, POLYTHEISM, AND PARODY extract the individual from a potential plurality. God is dead does not mean that the ceases to act as a clarification of existence, but rather that the absolute guarantee of the identity of the responsible self vanishes from the horizon of Nietzsche's consciousness, which in turn merges with this disappearance. Jf the concept of identity vanishes, at first sight all that remains is the fortuitousness that befalls consciousness. Up until then, consciousness recognized the fortuitous by virtue of its apparently necessary identity, which judges that all things around it are either necessary or fortuitous. But, as soon as the fortuitous is revealed to consciousness as the necessary effect of a universal law, as the wheel of fortune, it can consider itself to be fortuitous. All that remains for consciousness is to declare that its own identity is a fortuitous case arbitrarily maintained as necessary, even if this means understanding itself through this universal wheel of fortune, and even if this means embracing (if possible) the totality of cases-fortuitousness itself in its necessary totality. What subsists then is being, and the verb "to be" is never applicable to being itself, but to the fortuitous. In

Nietzsche's declaration, "1 am ChambigeJ 1 am Badinguet; 1 am Prado ...At bottom 1 am every name in history,"28 we can see his consciousness enumerating, like so many drawings in a lottery, the differel1t possibilities of being that, taken together, would be being itself. These different possibilities make use of the momentary success that is named Nietzsehe, but who, as a success, winds up abdicating himself for a more generous demonstration of being. "In the end I would much rather be a Baselprofessor than God; but I have not daredpush mypersonal sofar as to desistfor its sakefrom the creation oJ the world... One must make sacriftces however and wherever one lives."29 Existence as the eternal return of all things is produced in the physiognomies of as many multiple gods as it has possible manifestations in the souls ofmen. Jfthe will adheres to this perpetual movement of the universe, what i

111 PIERRE KLOSSOWSI